Passive RFID works in very much the same way as what this Kickstarter describes. An RF pulse gives it just enough juice to do a miniscule amount of processing (looking up a stored number), then broadcast it back out to the world. Yes, capturing background RF would take some doing, but I don't know that I'd call it all that far outside the realm of plausibility.
The difference is distance; RFID only works with the reader very close to the tag (or with a large, directional antenna). Remember that RF strength decreases by the square of the distance (inverse-square law) and even just a few cm away from the reader RFID tags stop working. These iFind tags would be receiving even less energy than that, and if you can't power an RFID tag with that you're not going to be able to power an active Bluetooth device either.
Right so, instead of building stronger homes that don't collapse into a heap during strong winds, we'll create an absolutely gigantic wall to protect all the flimsy nailed together timber and drywall constructions within?
China's downfall in production will come when the factory workers start having unions that are too powerful.
That's a bit of a leap, they don't even have unions!
...
If only the US didn't have unions, they could be in the same position as China; with a massive workforce of virtually slave labourers with no rights, huge polluting factories not bound by those damn profit sapping environmental laws etc.! What a wondrous future that would be! <tears>
And graphics programmers need both frame rate and pixels. 120Hz seems perfect, but once you try using 3D vision glasses, those LCD shutters bring back the flicker.
We're not using CRTs anymore, LCD panels don't flicker with the refresh rate so 24hz, 30hz, 60hz, 120hz will all be just as steady.
That's an ignorant argument though. It's like telling a doctor not to bandage a slit wrist because it doesn't fix the underlying problem.
No it's not, it's more treating a wound that requires stitches with just a bandage when stitches are readily available to use.
No one is saying these types of things should be permanent, they're just to keep people healthy until economic development can provide a better diet. Somehow I doubt the people this would help are going to play the nirvana fallacy.
How much has it cost to develop and how much is it going to cost to plant this across the entire country (there's no info in the article) and how much would it cost to plant existing high vitamin A crops, say orange sweet potato to replace the locally grown sweet potato variety?
Why go to all the trouble of creating a new crop which is just a clone of an existing crop with a bit extra if it would cost the same to simply provide an additional crop?
Your cost claim is ridiculous. It costs a lot less to make a GMO than to fix a shitload of socioeconomic and political problems
Who says you can only start fixing poor diet once all the socioeconomic and political problems have been fixed? That's just dumb.
As for your corporate issue, this is developed by a university funded by a charity.
Is it really patent unencumbered? Just because Bill Gates is paying for its development doesn't prove it'll be free for farmers forever.
Perhaps you should RFTA before making assumptions. You've just justified the GP's post.
First of all the GP's post is a generalisation not related to this specific research, and secondly there's no detail in this article or anywhere else on how much it's going to cost and what, if any, strings will be attached to the deal.
Yeah, the actual argument used against this kind of GMO use is that it would cost the same to treat the root cause of the problem by teaching people to grow a wider range of crops and the importance of a balanced diet, rather than this stop-gap solution that provides no long-term change (they're still not eating a balanced diet) and makes people reliant on western industrial food conglomerates with extremely poor human rights records.
You CAN blame the Africans as they are to busy killing themselves.
Talk about victim blaming, how about we blame colonial countries for pillaging natural resources, slicing land up into arbitrary countries, pitting ethnic groups against each other and generally forcing everyone to live in western style cities that are perfect for breeding malaria mosquitoes?
I cannot remember ASDFDAVUDSFWSNASDCNACKEFADCKSA Which is also an IPV6 address
I can easily remember 10.0.0.0.1 as my new local 5-octet private subnet. But jeeze don't just add 500 alphabet characters expecting things to be the same.
You seem to not realise that IP6 has shorthand built in.
For example the IP6 address of Wikipedia is 2001:503:BA3E::2:30, not really that much harder than 91.198.174.192 is it?
Local subnets are even easier, fe80::1 is actually shorter than 10.0.0.0.1
As I said in a follow-up comment as I forgot to quote it first time:
Fossil fuel subsidies reached $90 billion in the OECD and over $500 billion globally in 2011.[1] Renewable energy subsidies reached $88 billion in 2011.
Whatever the source of that money, we are currently spending over 5x more on fossil fuel than on renewables which makes the argument that we're spending a lot of money on renewables and not seeing much in return pretty moot.
Fossil fuel subsidies reached $90 billion in the OECD and over $500 billion globally in 2011.[1] Renewable energy subsidies reached $88 billion in 2011.
With all the money that has been spent on global warming/climate change with little to no results do they think the American public will keep pushing billions their way with no results
Probably because anything over around 40" inches was impossibly big and even small CRT TVs take up a lot more depth than gigantic flat panels.
For desk use LCDs offer much better sharpness, less flicker and again the smaller size makes large flat panels a lot more convenient than tiny CRT monitors.
Enough time to rewrite the binaries, change the passwords, and disable the whole lot since it's all been compromised for years. Gets rid of a dangerous product, and pisses off the Feds without violating the terms of anything since TC is still available for download, just in a crippled form.
Well, the TrueCrypt audit project did manage to exactly recreate the binaries from the source file and so far haven't seen anything fishy in the source code other than some slightly weak encryption options making brute forcing of weak to medium strength passwords realistic.
The commentary track and the act of actually playing the game is completely original work as the actions taken by the player are not scripted by Nintendo, therefore it's clearly a fair use derivative work as proven by countless legal precedents.
Youtube has had content recognition for ages. Try to upload a commercial song and you'll soon be slapped with either ads (with the proceeds going to the copyright holder) or blocked depending what options the copyright holder has set.
HTML5 video means you don't need Youtube anymore to successfully distribute videos. Torrent or stream yourself. P2P is the answer
Um, HTML5 video doesn't have anything to do with P2P. If you want to create an HTML5 video streaming site you still need the heavyweight backend and bandwidth that Youtube has, the only difference is you wouldn't be using Flash.
Robots don't have displays. It's really difficult to get your work done if your monitor keeps skittering away across the lab. Visualization tools for various pieces of robot state are much better than text dumps -- not surprisingly.
For this use case wouldn't it be a lot more appropriate to stream raw data from the robot to software running on a desktop machine to represent it visually? Surely it's a waste of CPU effort drawing a GUI on the robot itself?
Flexible Funding makes it very suspicious as they can just pocket all the money people donate even if they don't reach their funding goal. This is probably a scam and will never go anywhere.
Yes, you could implement DRM through binary plugins before, but there's still a difference between that and explicitly supporting DRM. If you don't see that difference, I'm unable to explain it because to me that is just so absolutely clear.
I understand the difference from a narrow ideological argument, but can you see that the current system is worse for internet freedom than the system they are proposing?
After installing Firefox as soon as you start browsing video sites you are actively prompted to download and install a dangerous, closed source proprietary plugin that has complete access to your local system resources. Firefox has always supported this, and never tried to prevent this from happening.
The new system removes any need for that plugin, instead any proprietary component is reduced to the bare minimum and run in a sandbox.
It just makes no sense to denounce Mozilla for offering an extremely limited video decoding API while ignoring the fact they actively support monstrosities like Flash.
Slashdot Mirror
RFID? As long as your tags are no more than a few mm away from your phone sure that would work :)
Passive RFID works in very much the same way as what this Kickstarter describes. An RF pulse gives it just enough juice to do a miniscule amount of processing (looking up a stored number), then broadcast it back out to the world. Yes, capturing background RF would take some doing, but I don't know that I'd call it all that far outside the realm of plausibility.
The difference is distance; RFID only works with the reader very close to the tag (or with a large, directional antenna). Remember that RF strength decreases by the square of the distance (inverse-square law) and even just a few cm away from the reader RFID tags stop working. These iFind tags would be receiving even less energy than that, and if you can't power an RFID tag with that you're not going to be able to power an active Bluetooth device either.
Right so, instead of building stronger homes that don't collapse into a heap during strong winds, we'll create an absolutely gigantic wall to protect all the flimsy nailed together timber and drywall constructions within?
Yeah that makes perfect sense.
You would rather the unemployed remain so, rather than get a job, however little the pay?
United States unemployment: 6.3% minimum wage: US$7.25 per hour
Australia unemployment: 5.8% minimum wage: US$16.88 per hour
China's downfall in production will come when the factory workers start having unions that are too powerful.
That's a bit of a leap, they don't even have unions!
...
If only the US didn't have unions, they could be in the same position as China; with a massive workforce of virtually slave labourers with no rights, huge polluting factories not bound by those damn profit sapping environmental laws etc.! What a wondrous future that would be! <tears>
And graphics programmers need both frame rate and pixels. 120Hz seems perfect, but once you try using 3D vision glasses, those LCD shutters bring back the flicker.
We're not using CRTs anymore, LCD panels don't flicker with the refresh rate so 24hz, 30hz, 60hz, 120hz will all be just as steady.
Are you kidding me? Staring at 30 Hz console output is maddening
Huh? How can you tell the difference? It's not like it's a CRT only scanning lines at 30hz.
That's an ignorant argument though. It's like telling a doctor not to bandage a slit wrist because it doesn't fix the underlying problem.
No it's not, it's more treating a wound that requires stitches with just a bandage when stitches are readily available to use.
No one is saying these types of things should be permanent, they're just to keep people healthy until economic development can provide a better diet. Somehow I doubt the people this would help are going to play the nirvana fallacy.
How much has it cost to develop and how much is it going to cost to plant this across the entire country (there's no info in the article) and how much would it cost to plant existing high vitamin A crops, say orange sweet potato to replace the locally grown sweet potato variety?
Why go to all the trouble of creating a new crop which is just a clone of an existing crop with a bit extra if it would cost the same to simply provide an additional crop?
Your cost claim is ridiculous. It costs a lot less to make a GMO than to fix a shitload of socioeconomic and political problems
Who says you can only start fixing poor diet once all the socioeconomic and political problems have been fixed? That's just dumb.
As for your corporate issue, this is developed by a university funded by a charity.
Is it really patent unencumbered? Just because Bill Gates is paying for its development doesn't prove it'll be free for farmers forever.
Perhaps you should RFTA before making assumptions. You've just justified the GP's post.
First of all the GP's post is a generalisation not related to this specific research, and secondly there's no detail in this article or anywhere else on how much it's going to cost and what, if any, strings will be attached to the deal.
Yeah, the actual argument used against this kind of GMO use is that it would cost the same to treat the root cause of the problem by teaching people to grow a wider range of crops and the importance of a balanced diet, rather than this stop-gap solution that provides no long-term change (they're still not eating a balanced diet) and makes people reliant on western industrial food conglomerates with extremely poor human rights records.
Got any non-strawman arguments against that?
You CAN blame the Africans as they are to busy killing themselves.
Talk about victim blaming, how about we blame colonial countries for pillaging natural resources, slicing land up into arbitrary countries, pitting ethnic groups against each other and generally forcing everyone to live in western style cities that are perfect for breeding malaria mosquitoes?
I can remember number.number.number.number.
I cannot remember ASDFDAVUDSFWSNASDCNACKEFADCKSA Which is also an IPV6 address
I can easily remember 10.0.0.0.1 as my new local 5-octet private subnet. But jeeze don't just add 500 alphabet characters expecting things to be the same.
You seem to not realise that IP6 has shorthand built in.
For example the IP6 address of Wikipedia is 2001:503:BA3E::2:30, not really that much harder than 91.198.174.192 is it?
Local subnets are even easier, fe80::1 is actually shorter than 10.0.0.0.1
As I said in a follow-up comment as I forgot to quote it first time:
Fossil fuel subsidies reached $90 billion in the OECD and over $500 billion globally in 2011.[1] Renewable energy subsidies reached $88 billion in 2011.
Whatever the source of that money, we are currently spending over 5x more on fossil fuel than on renewables which makes the argument that we're spending a lot of money on renewables and not seeing much in return pretty moot.
Oops, forgot to quote the figures
Fossil fuel subsidies reached $90 billion in the OECD and over $500 billion globally in 2011.[1] Renewable energy subsidies reached $88 billion in 2011.
With all the money that has been spent on global warming/climate change with little to no results do they think the American public will keep pushing billions their way with no results
All that moneyspent on climate change? The fossil fuel industry receives more subsidies than renewables by a wide margin (70% of US energy subsidies goes to fossil fuels).
Maybe if we didn't give the fossil fuel industry hundreds of billions of dollars every year it would be easier to meet emission targets?
Forgetting something?
Remind me, why did we give up CRTs again?
Probably because anything over around 40" inches was impossibly big and even small CRT TVs take up a lot more depth than gigantic flat panels.
For desk use LCDs offer much better sharpness, less flicker and again the smaller size makes large flat panels a lot more convenient than tiny CRT monitors.
Better response times too!
Ah I see, I had re-read the original slashdot post about it and misread it as a quote from the truecrypt audit project.
Enough time to rewrite the binaries, change the passwords, and disable the whole lot since it's all been compromised for years. Gets rid of a dangerous product, and pisses off the Feds without violating the terms of anything since TC is still available for download, just in a crippled form.
Well, the TrueCrypt audit project did manage to exactly recreate the binaries from the source file and so far haven't seen anything fishy in the source code other than some slightly weak encryption options making brute forcing of weak to medium strength passwords realistic.
I think you'll find that commercial derivative works, even if unauthorized, are fair use.
The commentary track and the act of actually playing the game is completely original work as the actions taken by the player are not scripted by Nintendo, therefore it's clearly a fair use derivative work as proven by countless legal precedents.
Youtube has had content recognition for ages. Try to upload a commercial song and you'll soon be slapped with either ads (with the proceeds going to the copyright holder) or blocked depending what options the copyright holder has set.
HTML5 video means you don't need Youtube anymore to successfully distribute videos. Torrent or stream yourself. P2P is the answer
Um, HTML5 video doesn't have anything to do with P2P. If you want to create an HTML5 video streaming site you still need the heavyweight backend and bandwidth that Youtube has, the only difference is you wouldn't be using Flash.
Robots don't have displays. It's really difficult to get your work done if your monitor keeps skittering away across the lab. Visualization tools for various pieces of robot state are much better than text dumps -- not surprisingly.
For this use case wouldn't it be a lot more appropriate to stream raw data from the robot to software running on a desktop machine to represent it visually? Surely it's a waste of CPU effort drawing a GUI on the robot itself?
Flexible Funding makes it very suspicious as they can just pocket all the money people donate even if they don't reach their funding goal. This is probably a scam and will never go anywhere.
Yes, you could implement DRM through binary plugins before, but there's still a difference between that and explicitly supporting DRM. If you don't see that difference, I'm unable to explain it because to me that is just so absolutely clear.
I understand the difference from a narrow ideological argument, but can you see that the current system is worse for internet freedom than the system they are proposing?
After installing Firefox as soon as you start browsing video sites you are actively prompted to download and install a dangerous, closed source proprietary plugin that has complete access to your local system resources. Firefox has always supported this, and never tried to prevent this from happening.
The new system removes any need for that plugin, instead any proprietary component is reduced to the bare minimum and run in a sandbox.
It just makes no sense to denounce Mozilla for offering an extremely limited video decoding API while ignoring the fact they actively support monstrosities like Flash.